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Following Arena Holdings' acquisition of South Africa's largest and oldest independent label Gallo Record Company (Gallo Music Investments - GMI), is now showing its interest in the future of the African music industry by partnering with Africa's biggest content aggregator, Content Connect Africa (CCA). The 45% equity transaction links Gallo's rich catalogue with CCA's technical capabilities and Pan-African reach to provide a platform for innovation for African Music.
Together CCA and Gallo’s vision, built on its 95 years of experience, coupled with fellow shareholder Black Coffee’s global experience, will provide emerging artists with an opportunity to benefit from the slipstream of established artists as a pathway to regional and international success.
Black Coffee - Image: Supplied
The CCA and GMI partnership kicks off with the two entities partnering with artists on brand work, providing backend services for independent labels, developing, and launching continental artists.
We’re at the beginning of an industry revolution where African artists participate in structures to encourage new ways to monetise content,” says CCA CEO Antos Stella. “CCA has a footprint across the continent as an aggregator to the continent’s major Telco’s as well as a pipeline of established and emerging artists that will benefit from Gallo and its shareholder Black Coffee’s experience and guidance towards an equitable transformation.Those relationships are crucial to developing continental stars and, ultimately, exporting them globally. “We’ve had the same 10 or 15 artists dominate the last decade, this partnership provides us the capacity to develop faster by leveraging technology and the CCA relationships,” Black Coffee explains.
GMI and CCA view this as an important partnership to empower African artists through greater engagement and participation. This means transitioning away from only an ownership model and evolving to a rights management model and a more strategic approach to industry development through better education and providing digital tools for the continent’s creators.
“We would like to see artists far more involved in the process and not be tied to the one size fits all deal structures. We want to develop solutions that are born from Africa, for Africa, to export to the world. Our approach is underpinned by an emphasis on the use of scalable digital tools that support the creative process.” notes Simukayi Mukuna GMI Managing Director.
